![]() ![]() Robin passed tryouts for the Exy team and became its substitute goalkeeper. When Robin asked to enroll at the local high school, her parents cried and cried, because their baby girl might be okay after all. She still didn’t want to go for runs by herself, though, so her father put a treadmill in the basement next to his free weights. Her rewards for these successes were books on how to play Exy, and the teacher’s son started coming over in the evenings to coach her. She followed her father on walks and her mother to the grocery store and her teacher to games. Robin started carrying it everywhere with her, and so long as she had it she could start leaving the house. The teacher spoke to Robin’s parents about it, then spoke to her church group, and together they raised enough money to buy Robin a goalkeeper’s racquet. Robin's teacher suggested she start playing Exy and Robin knew if she played she’d want to be a goalkeeper: with a wall at her back, enough armor to protect her from the world, and breathing room between her and the rest of the players on the court. Robin tried turning back twice on the way there, but stuck it out and was rewarded by the unparalleled excitement of a live game. ![]() Four months later the teacher talked Robin into leaving the house to watch one of the school’s matches. When all of Robin’s schoolwork was done for the day the two of them would curl up on the couch and watch a game. The teacher’s son was the coach at the local high school, so she’d learned all she could about Exy to support his passion. Robin drew them when she was afraid, when she was on the verge of having panic attacks, when this world was too big with too many people in it and she missed her tiny prison and Steven’s questionable protection. It was this teacher who discovered Robin’s notebooks: cover to cover drawings of Exy racquets and mascots painstakingly recreated from memory. After struggling with the fear of letting strangers near her daughter, her mother finally recruited an older woman from church to home-school Robin. For months she panicked any time her mother tried to coax her out of the house, so returning to school was out of the question. Robin was reunited with her real family and subjected to a lot of unsuccessful therapy. She was caught by a good Samaritan when she tried to run. Steven and the child got away, but Robin did not. When Robin was eleven, Steven used her as bait to secure a new, younger child. In this way Exy became associated with freedom to a girl who’d forgotten what freedom really was. She was only let out of her room for dinner, and her Exy-obsessed captor would always put a game on while they ate. She spent most of her childhood locked in a room with boarded-up windows. (It was a heated argument about a portfolio and her mother turned away to try and hide her obvious outrage from her daughter) Robin’s body was never found because her new “father” Steven had no intentions of killing her. When Robin was five, she was taken from a playground in Newark while her mother was distracted on a phone call. ![]()
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